08 — Sofas and Shrimps
I’ve moved a lot in my adult life, and not once I’ve wanted to move with one of my sofas. This particular relationship, the one with this massive piece of furniture, has been one of regrets, of second chances, of swiping left (or right) for better options even after a brand new purchase. If I had to date online in 2023, that’s how I would imagine my relationship towards it to be: complicated.
A small disclaimer here, I am not dishing on any of these brands, I am sharing with you the experiences I had with these pieces of furniture. I continue to love and buy from these brands, perhaps not these sofas.
I want to start from the early 2000s when Pinterest boards were not a thing and people didn’t have a front-row seat onto your living room: I had the classic IKEA Ektorp sofa bed. It was a small little trooper. At that point, I lived in a 23-square-meter studio apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and space was, well, limited. This photo was taken from my living room, bedroom, and home office. The sofa in itself served its purpose, was it a comfortable sofa? No. Was it great to have it in a small space, and only pull it out at bedtime? Yes.
I’ve had two more Ikea sofas and sofa beds, of which I have no pictures: the Beddinge and the Karlstad. Comfort was not in my mind, they were only budget-friendly necessities. Let’s carry on.
It’s now around 2016, in Berlin. By then I had already been working in the field of design and interiors for a few years with perks like employee discounts. I was the Head of Creative at Hem and I, of course, purchased a Palo sofa. That time coincided with when I started sharing how my interiors looked online, and the classic features of the 1920s apartment I lived in, with the 4mt high ceilings and crown moldings made the modern furniture choice look like an excellent visual contrast. The space looked open, and uncluttered but did I love feeling like a shrimp when watching TV? No. Am I a low-back sofa kind of gal? No. That lesson I have learned.
In my opinion, these low-back, modular sofas are wonderful options if you have a wide open space and use them to section off areas and limit visual clutter. They’ll look wonderful from any angle so anything like the Palo sofa from Hem, the popular Mags from Hay, or the Strips from Arflex would be good options even more so if you entertain a lot, allowing guests to sit or casually lean on them.
In 2019, I went from a low-back to a furniture icon: the Maralunga sofa by Vico Magistretti for Cassina—a classic piece of design, coveted by many. You know by now that I am Italian so I don’t want to praise too much the Italian designs of the 70s with the risk of sounding biased, but this one, for the time, was a truly avant-garde piece. Since then the brand might have updated its construction, although, for the time this sofa lived in my apartment, regardless of which edition the sofa was, sitting on it made me feel like a shrimp, a crumpled 2.0 shrimp. The backrest when folded up falls more or less at the head height, leaving you with no back support, and if folded down it pushes your back forward. More so, if you have a loved one that you want to be close to and would like to sit side by side and watch a movie, well, no, no, sir, you can’t. The metal structure around the backrests doesn’t allow for two people to sit next to each other, on the contrary, you have to stay at a PG-13 distance. Goodbye, beautiful icon that you are.
The next was another design sofa, the Alcove by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra. At the time, these were the positives that I looked at: a high backrest, no metal construction behind anyone’s neck, plenty of pillows, and no defined seat separation. It would accommodate 4 people quite easily despite it being a 3-seater, you could lay flat on it whilst still having plenty of room left and as lovely as it was, it lived here for a total of about 3 years. Why did it have to leave? After a while, it started to feel like you were sitting on an overnight bus. Comfortable at first, then increasingly uncomfortable as time went by.
The story, or shall I call it saga, continues. Since the Alcove, a new modern-looking sofa has entered my life. I won’t talk about this one just yet because it’s too early. What can I say is that I am already looking forward to the next one.
I don’t know if I am building way too many expectations here, but for the next one, I have high hopes. I dream of a specific kind of comfort, the one typical of inviting British living rooms, with squishy, deep, high-back, velvety, roll-arm sofas you just want to curl up on, feel cozy and comfortable, and enjoy reading and watching hours of movies or cooking shows. I dream of comfort, of pure, inviting comfort. Going against the style that I gravitate towards which I would say is modern and calm, such sofas are associated with rich interiors with colorful walls and wallpapers. I wonder if I am going through a midlife crisis of sorts, or if I’m just tired or feeling like a shrimp.
